Re: Can my mini laptop handle Windows 8 and Ubuntu

If you dual boot, you are not running at same time, unless you install in a Virtual memory configuration.

My 7 year old laptop is dual core 1.66GHz with 1.5GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. Of course it originally had/has XP but I shrunk it and now do not boot it normally.

I have full Ubuntu but with only 1.5GB of RAM do not use Unity but gnome-fallback with the 64 bit 12.04LTS. If I load several large apps at once I see it turn grey for a second so I know it is using swap. But normal web browsing with a couple of smaller apps it still works well.

So with 4GB of RAM you should be able to run Ubuntu. You can download and run in live mode from USB flash drive. If you want you can test the various flavors to see what you like. It is a bit slower from flash loading and even slower from DVD, but once apps are loaded into memory they are cached so it runs reasonably well from live version.

Is this a UEFI system, pre-installed Windows 8 are. You will need to follow link in my signature and review the install links.

Re: Thinking of installing Ubuntu but not sure if laptop can take it

The specs seem fine. Anything powerful enough to run Win8 is capable of running Ubuntu.

There's one thing though, laptops sometimes have some peculiar hardware. Good Linux drivers aren't always available and if they are, it sometimes takes some effort to get them working. This in contrast to Windows, as hardware manufacturers always supply Windows drivers themselves. Wifi and graphics are most problematic. Best way to check is running the live disk.